Lead Oxide As A Sintering Aid For Liquid Phase Sintering Of Lead Magnesium Niobate

It is known that sintering of pure lead magnesium niobate (PMN) powder requires relatively high temperatures (>1100 deg C) and the latter necessitates the use of costly high palladium-based electrode for multilayer capacitors. In this paper the authors have shown that PMN can be rapidly sintered at 900 deg C (30 min soaking) by using 2-3 wt% excess PbO. However, appreciable densification by the aforesaid method is only possible when the particle size of the PMN powder is quite large (>15um).